Avocado Fest

A couple weekends ago we went to this funky little Avocado Festival right down the road from the farm. It's avocado season right now, and man are they going off! We've been eating guacamole with every meal :) mmmmmm! I had no idea how many different varieties of avocado there are. On the mainland we usually just see Hass or Sharwil. And the picture above only shows the tip of the iceberg!

There was good food and music and some pretty entertaining activities like this human avocado sculpture. Those poor people got wrapped in plastic and then had plaster poured on top of them in 90 degree heat! It was pretty funny to watch, but I felt bad for them. I saw a couple people escape. Whose idea was that?

We also went to an avocado grafting workshop put on by this funny Cooperative Extension guy. Like many fruit trees, you can start new trees from seed, but they will probably not grow to produce the same fruit as the parent tree. You have to graft part of a fruiting tree (called a scion) onto your new tree seedling in order for it to produce the desired fruit. Douglas just planted a bunch of avocado seedlings in the ground at our farm, and we will be grafting them soon, so this workshop was helpful. You basically just cut a wedge in the stem of your tree seedling and cut the bottom of the scion into a V-shape and stick it into the wedge on the seedling. Then you tape it together with special tape to keep moisture out and help it mend. Eventually the tree will begin to grow from the graft spot and will take on the traits of the scion (you have to cut off the other part of the tree because it will also grow). In the picture above, he just grafted the scion from a fruiting tree to the stem of a seedling and is taping it together. The scion is the curved thing sticking out to the right with buds. Pretty cool!